A little more about Bullying

My dad has been reading Nineteen Minutes. I passed the book over to him a couple of weeks ago with some reluctance. He is always interested in what I am reading, and we usually share our choices. But I did not know if he would relate to this story, at the age of 95, or whether I wanted to weigh him down with it either. I told him to read the jacket and decide if this was something he wanted to read or not. He was hooked in minutes. He just finished it, and marveled at how Jodi Picoult could have such insight into all the players in the drama. I assured him that she had surely done her homework as far as researching the topic and that her description of a modern high school rang true. I asked him if he remembered bullying from his own school days, expecting to hear a negative response. On the contrary, he did specifically remember two boys that were targeted in his school days. As is often the case today, nothing was really done by teachers or administrators at his small town Texas schools to remedy the situations. Years later, one of these two boys, all grown up, took his own life. Bullying has been around for a very long time.